Quad-core Sony smartphone with 1080p display rumored for CES

To compete with the Nexus 4 and Droid DNA, Sony needs to move quickly.

A quad-core Sony Xperia phone is rumored to debut at CES in January, according the Chinese-language site ePrice. The phone’s screen will rival that of the giant Samsung Galaxy Note series at 5 inches, but will outpace its competitor’s displays with a 1080p resolution.

Rumors have been swirling about a Sony phone meant to compete on the level of LG’s Nexus 4 or HTC’s Droid DNA, both of which launched this past fall. The upcoming Sony phone, designated as the Xperia Z L36h, is reported to have a 13-megapixel backside-illuminated camera, Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 quad-core processor with Adreno 320 GPU, 2GB of RAM, and a microSD slot, according to ePrice.

Devices that debut at CES often have launch dates that slip into the following fall, so if Sony intends for this phone to compete with first-class phones (something Sony's recent smartphone candidates have failed to do) the company had better move quickly. ePrice alleges that the phone will launch January 15, only a few days after CES commences on January 8.

Casey Johnston
Casey Johnston is the former Culture Editor at Ars Technica, and now does the occasional freelance story. She graduated from Columbia University with a degree in Applied Physics. Twitter@caseyjohnston

Yes, this is all good, but with Sony's track record, I would not be surprised if it came out with just ICS and "JB update to follow up ... a few months later". Still waiting on JB for my Xperia Ion ... and it came with GB at release just a few months ago. LOL

Aside from sheer bragging rights, I don't see the point of a 1080p display on a phone. With a 4"-5" screen, you are going to be above 300 ppi with 720p displays, and you aren't going to be able to distinguish the individual pixels at normal viewing distances. Unless you are putting together some enormous phablet, there just doesn't seem to be any real benefit to the customer for going 1080p.

Pro:Available soon after announcing the phone. (if true) This is one thing Apple does right.

Con:Probably only loaded with 4.1 (surprised if came with 4.2, not so surprised if came with 4.0) Sony has had some decent devices, but a bad track record of updating them (software and hardware updates alike).

Aside from sheer bragging rights, I don't see the point of a 1080p display on a phone. With a 4"-5" screen, you are going to be above 300 ppi with 720p displays, and you aren't going to be able to distinguish the individual pixels at normal viewing distances. Unless you are putting together some enormous phablet, there just doesn't seem to be any real benefit to the customer for going 1080p.

Not really true. From a phone's normal viewing distance we'll need to hit 600ppi at least before pixels really do become indistinguishable for almost everyone.

Too bad Sony will screw this up by loading Gingerbread on it. Why can't these companies quite screwing with Android and just load a clean version like the Nexus line. Sony, HTC, Samsung, Motorola you don't have better programmers then Google.

Aside from sheer bragging rights, I don't see the point of a 1080p display on a phone. With a 4"-5" screen, you are going to be above 300 ppi with 720p displays, and you aren't going to be able to distinguish the individual pixels at normal viewing distances. Unless you are putting together some enormous phablet, there just doesn't seem to be any real benefit to the customer for going 1080p.

Not really true. From a phone's normal viewing distance we'll need to hit 600ppi at least before pixels really do become indistinguishable for almost everyone.

Not true. With average eyesight, around 300 dpi is the magic number for a smartphone since normal human vision resolution is about 286 ppi at a distance of 1 foot. You have to have absolutely perfect eyesight to see the individual pixels, which very few people possess.

Aside from sheer bragging rights, I don't see the point of a 1080p display on a phone. With a 4"-5" screen, you are going to be above 300 ppi with 720p displays, and you aren't going to be able to distinguish the individual pixels at normal viewing distances. Unless you are putting together some enormous phablet, there just doesn't seem to be any real benefit to the customer for going 1080p.

Not really true. From a phone's normal viewing distance we'll need to hit 600ppi at least before pixels really do become indistinguishable for almost everyone.

Not true. With average eyesight, around 300 dpi is the magic number for a smartphone since normal human vision resolution is about 286 ppi at a distance of 1 foot. You have to have absolutely perfect eyesight to see the individual pixels, which very few people possess.

20/20 isn't actually average eyesight. 20/10 - 20/15 is. So you have to get beyond 400ppi from one foot difference to actually reach that level for the average person. And that's from a foot - I know I've brought mine closer to inspect something, though I'll admit that's not the normal use-case, that could make even higher ppi viable still.

20/20 isn't actually average eyesight. 20/10 - 20/15 is. So you have to get beyond 400ppi from one foot difference to actually reach that level for the average person. And that's from a foot - I know I've brought mine closer to inspect something, though I'll admit that's not the normal use-case, that could make even higher ppi viable still.

It's odd Bad Astronomy would get the 20/20 = average thing wrong.

I think that as an astronomer he's had a lot more experience at dealing with the limits of human eyesight, so he knows that the 1 arcminute of resolution is a lot more realistic a number to use. Also, the 20/10 and 20/5 numbers are a little bit useless because those numbers deal with the viewing things at a distance. My wife is farsighted, so she has 20/20 vision when looking at an eye chart, but she can't read a book without her glasses. With all the people out there that wear glasses, contacts, or reading glasses/bifocals, it just doesn't seem realistic to think that the majority of people have better than 20/20 vision at smartphone distances.

Aside from sheer bragging rights, I don't see the point of a 1080p display on a phone. With a 4"-5" screen, you are going to be above 300 ppi with 720p displays, and you aren't going to be able to distinguish the individual pixels at normal viewing distances. Unless you are putting together some enormous phablet, there just doesn't seem to be any real benefit to the customer for going 1080p.

It's just like the megapixel race we had in photo cameras. Now we get a megapixel race on phones and tablets and probably on monitors and TVs later. Most people will just think that more equals better and get the phone (tablet, TV, monitor) with the highest resolution screen.

Nah, for that you need a 1080p 3-D screen. Fortunately (?) I'm sure we'll get those soon enough.

I wonder how well touch would work on a 3D screen for a device like this? the touch portion of the 3ds isn't 3d right? Would users have depth perception issues?

Anyway, the phone sounds like it could be pretty sweet technically if it launches around CES timeframe. I certainly wouldn't be a first adopter though :x

The 3D screen works great on my HTC Evo 3D, the touch/menus work just fine when you need to use them. Movies like "Prometheus", "Finding Nemo", "Paranorman" and others look great on the screen. There is an ideal view distance to have it look its best, though.

I didn't even know about the 3D feature when I got the phone, but I'm really glad I have it. Haven't tried any of the 3D games yet. Not sure if the 3D YouTube stuff works, either. That's next on the list.

Aside from sheer bragging rights, I don't see the point of a 1080p display on a phone. With a 4"-5" screen, you are going to be above 300 ppi with 720p displays, and you aren't going to be able to distinguish the individual pixels at normal viewing distances. Unless you are putting together some enormous phablet, there just doesn't seem to be any real benefit to the customer for going 1080p.

This is incorrect on all counts.

A) Apple's marketing tripe about what the human eye can distinguish is just that. They did a couple hand-wavey arguments toward some papers that have since been largely discredited.

B) hunt-the-pixel is a poor way of describing the limits of human visual acuity. The eye can pick up greater detail when said pixel is, say, an errant part of a color gradient or an outlier on a smooth curve (especially when that curve is part of a recognized glyph).

I don't blame Apple's marketing department for doing marketing. When people cite marketing material, years later, as if it was scientific, they call themselves out as ignorant at best. "Retina" marketing language is about as scientifically accurate as Camel Cigarette's T-Zone.

This shouldn't be a surprise. The printing industry works with mere dots of pigment, which the human eye has a harder time distinguishing than dots of actively-emitted light. Any printer worth his salt goes far beyond 300 DPI, and that's on a paper that may be much further from your face than a phone screen will be.

Aside from sheer bragging rights, I don't see the point of a 1080p display on a phone. With a 4"-5" screen, you are going to be above 300 ppi with 720p displays, and you aren't going to be able to distinguish the individual pixels at normal viewing distances. Unless you are putting together some enormous phablet, there just doesn't seem to be any real benefit to the customer for going 1080p.

This is incorrect on all counts.

A) Apple's marketing tripe about what the human eye can distinguish is just that. They did a couple hand-wavey arguments toward some papers that have since been largely discredited.

B) hunt-the-pixel is a poor way of describing the limits of human visual acuity. The eye can pick up greater detail when said pixel is, say, an errant part of a color gradient or an outlier on a smooth curve (especially when that curve is part of a recognized glyph).

I don't blame Apple's marketing department for doing marketing. When people cite marketing material, years later, as if it was scientific, they call themselves out as ignorant at best. "Retina" marketing language is about as scientifically accurate as Camel Cigarette's T-Zone.

This shouldn't be a surprise. The printing industry works with mere dots of pigment, which the human eye has a harder time distinguishing than dots of actively-emitted light. Any printer worth his salt goes far beyond 300 DPI, and that's on a paper that may be much further from your face than a phone screen will be.

A) Check out my linked article where Phil Plait makes a very convincing argument about how around 300 ppi is pretty much at the limits of human sight at smartphone distances. His math is sound, and the only real argument is if you are going to use the 0.6 arc minute or 1 arc minute number for human visual acuity. I tend to agree with his more conservative figure of 1 arc minute.

B) Printing resolution (dpi) and on screen resolution (ppi) are very different things because of how different printing processes work, so the numbers aren't really comparable. For high quality print output, a 300 ppi resolution original is generally recommended for high quality photographic prints, with different dpi settings depending on what printing process you are using:

Sony is one of the few smartphone manufacturers which has a decent selection of smaller phones (one example is Xperia V), and it attracts positive attention at least from the phones I've seen around me. I don't see why they would need to jump into the competition of jumbo-sized 5" screens, but I guess it doesn't hurt to have one model there.

As to the high res screen, many mistakenly take 300 ppi as a limit of visual acuity. The error seems to stem from the erroneous understanding that 1 arc minute should be the separation of two neighboring objects to see them as distinct ones, while in fact half of that value should be used since one needs to have a line separating the objects as well (I could go into further details but it's all online, and has been discussed ad nauseam). That being said, I personally have no use for pixel densities above 300 ppi, and many who might have will not prefer to trade off of any battery life or performance for this.

@Chuckstar I believe by color fidelity you actually mean contrast. Color fidelity is vastly overrated due to lack of knowledge about chromatic adaptation.

Aside from sheer bragging rights, I don't see the point of a 1080p display on a phone. With a 4"-5" screen, you are going to be above 300 ppi with 720p displays, and you aren't going to be able to distinguish the individual pixels at normal viewing distances. Unless you are putting together some enormous phablet, there just doesn't seem to be any real benefit to the customer for going 1080p.

I see similar comments all the time, but I don't understand. I have okay, but not perfect, vision. Yet I have no problem at all seeing the fuzzy anti-aliasing on the curved edges of text on this iPhone 5. Well-aligned, absolutely horizontal or vertical lines look perfect, but how many letters in how many common fonts are composed exclusively of such lines? A very small percent.

An okay scan is 4800dpi. A good scan on a common $50 scanner is 9600dpi. It doesn't translate to screen technology I hear. But I like clarity, and would love to see as-good-as-print-quality screens, and whether that happens at 600dpi or 60,000dpi, it's visibly clear (pun intended) that we're still many generations away from that, so let's not dampen the enthusiasm for progress toward that goal.

Aside from sheer bragging rights, I don't see the point of a 1080p display on a phone. With a 4"-5" screen, you are going to be above 300 ppi with 720p displays, and you aren't going to be able to distinguish the individual pixels at normal viewing distances. Unless you are putting together some enormous phablet, there just doesn't seem to be any real benefit to the customer for going 1080p.

This is incorrect on all counts.

A) Apple's marketing tripe about what the human eye can distinguish is just that. They did a couple hand-wavey arguments toward some papers that have since been largely discredited.

B) hunt-the-pixel is a poor way of describing the limits of human visual acuity. The eye can pick up greater detail when said pixel is, say, an errant part of a color gradient or an outlier on a smooth curve (especially when that curve is part of a recognized glyph).

I don't blame Apple's marketing department for doing marketing. When people cite marketing material, years later, as if it was scientific, they call themselves out as ignorant at best. "Retina" marketing language is about as scientifically accurate as Camel Cigarette's T-Zone.

This shouldn't be a surprise. The printing industry works with mere dots of pigment, which the human eye has a harder time distinguishing than dots of actively-emitted light. Any printer worth his salt goes far beyond 300 DPI, and that's on a paper that may be much further from your face than a phone screen will be.

The diffraction limit of the human eye is given by

This is an absolute upper bound on the resolution the eye can possibly perceive. It is set by physics, regardless of how the eye works internally. In practice, the resolution that the human eye can perceive is probably significantly lower than this.

For violet light (380 nm), a pupil diameter of 5 mm, and a viewing distance of 1 foot, the upper limit on the perceptible pixel density is 900 ppi. For red light (750 nm), the maximum pixel density is 455 ppi. These are some upper bounds to consider.

If Apple's marketing is right, the human eye is operating at a resolution of about a third its diffraction limit.

Aside from sheer bragging rights, I don't see the point of a 1080p display on a phone. With a 4"-5" screen, you are going to be above 300 ppi with 720p displays, and you aren't going to be able to distinguish the individual pixels at normal viewing distances. Unless you are putting together some enormous phablet, there just doesn't seem to be any real benefit to the customer for going 1080p.

This is incorrect on all counts.

A) Apple's marketing tripe about what the human eye can distinguish is just that. They did a couple hand-wavey arguments toward some papers that have since been largely discredited.

B) hunt-the-pixel is a poor way of describing the limits of human visual acuity. The eye can pick up greater detail when said pixel is, say, an errant part of a color gradient or an outlier on a smooth curve (especially when that curve is part of a recognized glyph).

I don't blame Apple's marketing department for doing marketing. When people cite marketing material, years later, as if it was scientific, they call themselves out as ignorant at best. "Retina" marketing language is about as scientifically accurate as Camel Cigarette's T-Zone.

This shouldn't be a surprise. The printing industry works with mere dots of pigment, which the human eye has a harder time distinguishing than dots of actively-emitted light. Any printer worth his salt goes far beyond 300 DPI, and that's on a paper that may be much further from your face than a phone screen will be.

The diffraction limit of the human eye is given by

This is an absolute upper bound on the resolution the eye can possibly perceive. It is set by physics, regardless of how the eye works internally. In practice, the resolution that the human eye can perceive is probably significantly lower than this.

For violet light (380 nm), a pupil diameter of 5 mm, and a viewing distance of 1 foot, the upper limit on the perceptible pixel density is 900 ppi. For red light (750 nm), the maximum pixel density is 455 ppi. These are some upper bounds to consider.

If Apple's marketing is right, the human eye is operating at a resolution of about a third its diffraction limit.

I really don't see what all the fuss is about. 1080P on a smart phone is excessive:"According to Raymond Soneira, president of DisplayMate Technologies, the resolution of the actual human retina is higher than claimed by Apple, working out to 477 pixels per inch at 12 inches (305 mm) from the eye. Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy wrote a response saying that "if you have [better than 20/20] eyesight, then at one foot away the iPhone 4's pixels are resolved. The picture will look pixellated. If you have AVERAGE eyesight [20/20 vision], the picture will look just fine," and concluded, "So in my opinion, what Jobs said was fine. Soneira, while technically correct, was being picky." Retinal neuroscientist Bryan Jones, using a similar but more detailed analysis, came to a similar conclusion on his blog, stating "...I’d find Apple’s claimsSTAND UP TO WHAT THE HUMAN EYE CAN PERCEIVE."http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retina_Display

Anyway, 4 cores with this screen real estate to support are gong to translate into a battery problem, IMHO. (Unless they're going after the Lumia 920 'brick' market and we all see how well THAT'S going.

This is an absolute upper bound on the resolution the eye can possibly perceive. It is set by physics, regardless of how the eye works internally. In practice, the resolution that the human eye can perceive is probably significantly lower than this.

For violet light (380 nm), a pupil diameter of 5 mm, and a viewing distance of 1 foot, the upper limit on the perceptible pixel density is 900 ppi. For red light (750 nm), the maximum pixel density is 455 ppi. These are some upper bounds to consider.

If Apple's marketing is right, the human eye is operating at a resolution of about a third its diffraction limit.

Thanks for the details; that's about what I've figured from the literature dedicated on eye research. A bunch of photographers, neurologists and astronomers have gotten their figures slightly off, but I consider their opinions as valid as those of any layman.

By the way, your image is useless in the night mode (black background), which is my default (and seems impossible to change ATM). Make sure you save text-containing PNGs without specifying transparency.

Aside from sheer bragging rights, I don't see the point of a 1080p display on a phone. With a 4"-5" screen, you are going to be above 300 ppi with 720p displays, and you aren't going to be able to distinguish the individual pixels at normal viewing distances. Unless you are putting together some enormous phablet, there just doesn't seem to be any real benefit to the customer for going 1080p.

This is incorrect on all counts.

A) Apple's marketing tripe about what the human eye can distinguish is just that. They did a couple hand-wavey arguments toward some papers that have since been largely discredited.

B) hunt-the-pixel is a poor way of describing the limits of human visual acuity. The eye can pick up greater detail when said pixel is, say, an errant part of a color gradient or an outlier on a smooth curve (especially when that curve is part of a recognized glyph).

I don't blame Apple's marketing department for doing marketing. When people cite marketing material, years later, as if it was scientific, they call themselves out as ignorant at best. "Retina" marketing language is about as scientifically accurate as Camel Cigarette's T-Zone.

This shouldn't be a surprise. The printing industry works with mere dots of pigment, which the human eye has a harder time distinguishing than dots of actively-emitted light. Any printer worth his salt goes far beyond 300 DPI, and that's on a paper that may be much further from your face than a phone screen will be.

A) Check out my linked article where Phil Plait makes a very convincing argument about how around 300 ppi is pretty much at the limits of human sight at smartphone distances. His math is sound, and the only real argument is if you are going to use the 0.6 arc minute or 1 arc minute number for human visual acuity. I tend to agree with his more conservative figure of 1 arc minute.

B) Printing resolution (dpi) and on screen resolution (ppi) are very different things because of how different printing processes work, so the numbers aren't really comparable. For high quality print output, a 300 ppi resolution original is generally recommended for high quality photographic prints, with different dpi settings depending on what printing process you are using:

Phil Plats whole argument that 300dpi is the upper range of human eye is based on the confusion that 20/40 would somehow be translatable to human eye resolution when it is the resolution of human eye at distance where most people have trouble getting image into focus for near-sightedness. For example my eyesight at distance without glasses is around 20/14, and with eyeglasses 20/40.

So by Phil Plaits calculations the resolution of my eye changes from less than 300 to over 400 just by adding glasses. That is correct if I were in a movie theater where I would be viewing a screen over 20 feet away and the lens in my eye couldn't transform enough to focus the image on retina. But with a phone my, and most people's, dpi limiting factor isn't nearsightness.

So the Phil Plats calculations are incorrect for simply making wrong assumption, that nearsightness would somehow determine the human eye resolution.

Aside from sheer bragging rights, I don't see the point of a 1080p display on a phone. With a 4"-5" screen, you are going to be above 300 ppi with 720p displays, and you aren't going to be able to distinguish the individual pixels at normal viewing distances. Unless you are putting together some enormous phablet, there just doesn't seem to be any real benefit to the customer for going 1080p.

This is incorrect on all counts.

A) Apple's marketing tripe about what the human eye can distinguish is just that. They did a couple hand-wavey arguments toward some papers that have since been largely discredited.

B) hunt-the-pixel is a poor way of describing the limits of human visual acuity. The eye can pick up greater detail when said pixel is, say, an errant part of a color gradient or an outlier on a smooth curve (especially when that curve is part of a recognized glyph).

I don't blame Apple's marketing department for doing marketing. When people cite marketing material, years later, as if it was scientific, they call themselves out as ignorant at best. "Retina" marketing language is about as scientifically accurate as Camel Cigarette's T-Zone.

This shouldn't be a surprise. The printing industry works with mere dots of pigment, which the human eye has a harder time distinguishing than dots of actively-emitted light. Any printer worth his salt goes far beyond 300 DPI, and that's on a paper that may be much further from your face than a phone screen will be.

The diffraction limit of the human eye is given by

This is an absolute upper bound on the resolution the eye can possibly perceive. It is set by physics, regardless of how the eye works internally. In practice, the resolution that the human eye can perceive is probably significantly lower than this.

For violet light (380 nm), a pupil diameter of 5 mm, and a viewing distance of 1 foot, the upper limit on the perceptible pixel density is 900 ppi. For red light (750 nm), the maximum pixel density is 455 ppi. These are some upper bounds to consider.

If Apple's marketing is right, the human eye is operating at a resolution of about a third its diffraction limit.

While that equation is a good rough estimate of the static optics involved, that isn't the whole picture. Human eyes jitter and the brain uses that jitter to perceive detail finer than would otherwise be possible. Because of this, humans can "see" a line that is theoretically beyond the capability indicated by that equation.

It wouldn't be surprising to see this trick become widely used in digital cameras or video post processing. Small devices like smartphones stand the most to benefit, with the limits of small lens and sensor yet an increasing surpluss of processing power.

...It wouldn't be surprising to see this trick become widely used in digital cameras or video post processing. Small devices like smartphones stand the most to benefit, with the limits of small lens and sensor yet an increasing surpluss of processing power.

A friend of mine made a similar assumption a few years back and lost. He spent a lot of effort developing smart super-resolution applications in the hope to improve image quality of digital cameras. While their software could effectively double the resolution of a camera, image sensors went down in price and more than quadrupled in resolution during the same time.

I'd rather have good optics than a software gimmick trying to compensate for poor ones.

While that equation is a good rough estimate of the static optics involved, that isn't the whole picture. Human eyes jitter and the brain uses that jitter to perceive detail finer than would otherwise be possible. Because of this, humans can "see" a line that is theoretically beyond the capability indicated by that equation.

Not to mention that the image that one sees are a combined image from two sensors (eyes).

So we'd actually need 477x2ppi not to discern the pixels at all. There's already 2 phones with 440PPI screens and I can say having seen the J Butterfly in person ... it needs more density and I'm betting 954PPI is going to be where it stops. Then we'll start needing to work more on the contrast issues since the LCDs suck and the current OLED screens have their own issues.

...It wouldn't be surprising to see this trick become widely used in digital cameras or video post processing. Small devices like smartphones stand the most to benefit, with the limits of small lens and sensor yet an increasing surpluss of processing power.

A friend of mine made a similar assumption a few years back and lost. He spent a lot of effort developing smart super-resolution applications in the hope to improve image quality of digital cameras. While their software could effectively double the resolution of a camera, image sensors went down in price and more than quadrupled in resolution during the same time.

I'd rather have good optics than a software gimmick trying to compensate for poor ones.

So you don't like your exceptional human vision? You'd rather have something worse based on dogmatic principle?